Sunday, April 30, 2017

Binomial stuff

One MS employee recently said to Stephanie (my partner) that (paraphrasing) "your company isn't stable and can't possibly last". My reply: We've been in business for over a year now, and our business is just a natural extension and continuation of our careers. I've been programming since 1985, and developing commercial data compression and other software since 1993. I've been doing this for a while and I'm not going to stop anytime soon.

Having my own small consulting company vs. just working full-time for a single corporation is just a natural next step to me. One thing I really liked about working at Valve was the ability to wheel my desk to virtually anywhere in the company and start adding value. I can now "wheel my desk" to anywhere in the world, and the freedom this gives us is amazing.

Binomial is a self-funded startup. We work on both development contracts and our current product (Basis). We haven't taken any investment money. Our "runway" is basically infinite.

About Me

Back in the day I worked for several years at Digital Illusions on things like the first shipping deferred shaded game ("Shrek" - 2001), software renderers, and game AI. Then, after working for Microsoft at Ensemble Studios for 5 years as engine lead on Halo Wars, I took a year off to create "crunch", an advanced DXTc texture compression library. I then worked 5 years at Valve, where I contributed to Portal 2, Dota 2, CS:GO, and the Linux versions of Valve's Source1 games. I was one of the original developers on the Steam Linux team, where I worked with a (somewhat enigmatic) multi-billionare on proving that OpenGL could still hold its own vs. Direct3D. I also started the vogl (Valve's OpenGL debugger) project from scratch, which I worked on for over a year. In my spare time I work on various open source lossless and texture compression projects: crunch, LZHAM, miniz, jpeg-compressor, and picojpeg.